Breathtaking Moment Scenarios
by PandoraAndBox
Summary: A series of short stories featuring Penny and Sheldon based on various prompts.
1. The Stiletto Heel Conundrum

This "story" is going to be a collection of short stories based on prompts I've collected. All of these shorts will feature Penny and Sheldon in different stages of their relationship.

Prompt one: _The Way You Walk_

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Sheldon was quite disgusted with himself when he finally realized just why he, and everyone else in the apartment, was so fascinated with Penny in her ridiculously high heels as she walked down the stairs. The height of the heels altered her typical stance, forcing her breasts and buttocks to thrust outward. It was a disgusting display, really, and he hadn't the slightest idea why he was watching her disappear down the stairs aside from the fact that everyone else was watching her, too.

For some reason, that bothered him.

The fact that everyone else was watching.

Oh, and him, too.

"I think someone needs to institute a new rule," Howard said, his voice breathy. Clearly, he was aroused. Sheldon glanced toward him, quickly taking stock of all physiological indicators of arousal. Dilated pupils? Check. Increased respiration? Check. Unclassifiable yet always recognizable vaguely-dreamy, slightly sleepy look? Check. The human need to mate was simply beyond him.

"What rule would that be?" Sheldon inquired even though with his superior intellect, he had already worked out what Howard was about to say.

"Every day should be stripper-shoe day," Howard replied.

Sheldon rolled his eyes, about to launch into an explanation of how Penny's stilettos could hardly be called _stripper_ shoes. Then he stopped and truly considered the fact that he was about to defend _Penny_. She could fight her own battles.

"I agree," Raj said.

"I don't understand why you're all obsessed with Penny's posterior," Sheldon finally said, doing a very good job of convincing himself that he wasn't _actually_ defending Penny by speaking up. "It is hardly the most attractive any of you have ever…" He searched for the right word. The only one he came up with was hardly scientific or exacting, but it would have to do. "…_ogled_." He made a quick mental note to himself to come up with a new word that sounded much more upright to replace "ogled" in the English language. Something that preferably had Latin or Greek roots and didn't sound like asinine baby talk.

Leonard quirked one brow, craning his neck to look Sheldon in the eye. Sheldon looked impassively back, ignoring the incredulous (and slightly amusing) looks of perturbed disbelief on Raj and Howard's faces. "It's not our fault you're entirely asexual, Sheldon," Leonard said.

Nodding emphatically, Howard added, "It's impossible to explain to someone who doesn't have a libido."

_If only they knew_.

"Very well. As you are incapable of explaining, I take my leave of you. Gentlemen, adieu." Sheldon strode by them and into the apartment, heading along the most direct route possible to his room. He had thinking he needed to do.

* * *

At exactly 8:35 the following morning, when Sheldon was in his spot on the couch, laptop on his lap, correcting the idiocy someone had posted on Wikipedia, Penny poked her head around the door and into the apartment.

"Sheldon?"

Sheldon turned his head toward her even though his gaze remained on his laptop screen for a few additional seconds. Both brows rose as he took in her disheveled appearance. A quick glance at the clock on his laptop screen confirmed that it _was_, in fact, 8:36 and he wasn't hallucinating Penny's presence. Returning his gaze to her, Sheldon took in her uncharacteristically disturbed appearance.

"You have been crying," he observed, noting the streaks of black mascara running faintly down her cheeks. Her eyes were puffy and red. She looked terrible. He had the wherewithal not to make a comment on that fact, however accurate it was. "And you are not usually up this early."

Penny shot him a vicious look. "Thanks, Captain Obvious," she muttered, sliding into the apartment and shutting the door behind her. "Is Leonard here?"

"No. Leonard went out with Howard and Raj approximately forty minutes ago." Sheldon considered her question. "Did you wish to speak with him?"

Shaking her head, Penny came further into the apartment. If Sheldon wasn't mistaken, and he rarely was, she was still wearing the halter she had left in the previous night. At least she had traded the skirt for a pair of ill-fitting pajama bottoms. In her hands was a pair of shoes.

"Sheldon, can I ask you something?"

"As long as you don't mind receiving an honest and unbiased answer." Sometimes Penny required answers that were neither of those two things. Sheldon had come to the conclusion that it was only fair to warn her that she would receive neither deception nor bias from him.

A faint smile appeared on her face as she slipped the shoes on and rolled her pajama pants up to her knees. The left side, to Sheldon's immense irritation, ended up hanging slightly lower than the right. He was quite proud, though, that he was able to keep his own silence and imagined himself to be quite the martyr. If only Penny knew.

She straightened and shuffled to the left to offer him a better view of her feet. "Do I look like a cheap hooker in these shoes?" she asked.

Immediately, Sheldon's mind went to a place that it ought never to have gone. The thought of killing a man became suddenly and painfully appealing. "I assume your date from last night thought you were?" The way Sheldon enunciated the word _date_ was full of derision and condescension.

Laughing faintly, Penny shook her head. "No, just about every other guy at the club did, though. I had one guy try to shove a twenty in my skirt in an effort to get a lap dance." Walking over to him, Penny flopped on the couch beside him, staring at her feet and the shoes she wore on them. "Course, he didn't have to say anything," she continued. "I didn't want to have sex with him, and don't you dare make some snide comment. I didn't. I wanted to go out to a club, have a fun time, and call him in the morning. Afternoon. Whenever I got up." Wrinkling her nose in distaste, Penny stood again.

Sheldon watched as she walked away from him. The poorly fitted pants did nothing to disguise the way the stilettos enhanced her backside. When she stopped and turned, Sheldon met her eyes, refusing to look lower than her neck. "So what do you think? Do I look like a stripper?"

_Supposing strippers wear halter tops and pajama pants that are two sizes too big, then yes, you do._ Except that strippers didn't have the type of face that Penny had. They also didn't have large eyes filled with the reticent hope that suffused Penny's. And he was romanticizing her. That was abnormal and unfortunate. It also merited further investigation and further investigation necessitated removing her from the premises.

"Do I?" she persisted, taking a step closer.

Sheldon set his laptop aside, canting his head to the left and peering up at her. "Penny, I fail to understand why you persist in this notion that you must be judged simply by what you look like," he said.

"Yeah, that whole spiel about the inside being what matters is a load of bologna and we both know it," she snapped back. "So just answer the damn question."

She was reacting with anger, which meant she wasn't very angry at all. Sheldon knew he didn't have social skills, and he didn't particularly care about that, but he did have a vast knowledge of the psychological sciences, even if they were largely hokum. Statistics said that people reacted with anger in order to cover up another emotion that they perceived would hurt their social standing in the eyes of another, usually a peer or someone of higher rank. Sheldon allowed himself a moment of pleasure at the idea that Penny might think he outranked her socially.

"_Sheldon_."

Rolling his eyes with a sigh of disgust, Sheldon shook his head. "No, Penny, you don't look like a stripper." Because she didn't. In all truth she looked like a five year old playing dress up in her mother's formal wear. With the exception of the pants.

"You're just saying that."

In that singular moment, Sheldon realized there was more to the situation than Penny was actually telling him. While it wasn't unusual for her to fish for compliments in such a manner, her current behavior was uncharacteristic. "Penny, have you ever known me to give you anything but an honest opinion?"

"No, but—"

He cut her off. He was good at that. "Then why do you assume that, now, I would follow an optional social convention like lying to you in order to make you feel better?"

She was silent. Sheldon allowed himself a moment to bask in the sweet victory. "You wouldn't," she muttered. The victory felt even sweeter.

With a self-satisfied noise of agreement, Sheldon lifted his laptop and placed it back on his lap. He settled his fingers on the keyboard, prepared to return to fixing all the mistakes on Wikipedia's page on string theory when there was a sudden weight beside him. Sheldon jerked away from Penny's presence as he turned to her, wide-eyed, wondering why she insisted on invading his personal space so often.

"Thanks, moon pie," Penny said quietly. She leaned further into his space. Sheldon's back hit the armrest of the couch and he realized he could go no further. Penny's lips brushed fleetingly over his cheek, and then she was gone from his personal space. A moment later, the door to the apartment was closed, and Sheldon was left with the tingling sensation left by her lips on his cheek and the image of her walking out the door.

Maybe Howard was on to something. There was just something about how she walked in those heels.

Stiffening, Sheldon jerked his head back and forth. "I need new companions." His attention turned back to the laptop screen. Three hours later, having removed all idiocy from the string theory page and having made the posters thoroughly aware of their mediocrity, Sheldon had almost entirely forgotten about Penny's earlier appearance in his apartment.

He was closing his laptop when Penny suddenly burst in, mumbled something about a kitchen mishap, and absconded with a stick of butter from the refrigerator.

_No_, Sheldon decided as, flabbergasted, he watched her leave, _it had nothing to do with the way she walked in those heels and everything to do with the way she simply walked_.


	2. The Communication Simplex

Brief note: I'm in need of a beta. If anyone's wiling to read what I write in horrid first-draft form, you can drop me a message or mention something in the comments. I'd prefer someone who is either willing to use 's docx or has a gmail account. Bonus points and a slice of my strawberry cheesecake pie if you've got both.

Prompt: _The Look in Your Eyes_

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"Hey, Sheldon!"

Penny invited herself into the apartment as soon as he opened the door. She knew the exact look he had on his face as he shut the door behind her. His eyes were definitely rolling; he was holding in a sigh of intense irritation. As she walked further into the apartment, she knew his eyes were swinging around and he was attempting to bore holes into his back with his mental powers.

"Penny, what are you doing here?"

Turning on the ball of one slippered foot, she grinned. "Thai night," she said. Obviously, it explained _everything_. Sheldon was so not as perceptive as he thought he was.

He scowled at her. "Penny, did you forget that Leonard is out of town?" Sheldon asked, walking around her and dropping into his spot. Up until that moment, she had planned on sitting there just to annoy him. Oh, well. Another time.

And she hadn't forgotten that Leonard was out of town.

Much.

Okay, so maybe for the space of time it took for her to drive home from work and walk across the hall to the boys' apartment she had completely and utterly forgotten the fact that Leonard wasn't there. He was… somewhere. Visiting his mother or something. It wasn't important.

"So no Thai night?" she asked.

"Leonard is not here, ergo, no Thai night," Sheldon replied. "If you had stopped to think, you would have surmised that on your own."

Penny rolled her eyes. "So what are you doing then?"

"Before Leonard left, we went to the grocery store and I purchased a number of prepackaged meals."

Her brows arched. "_You_ bought _tv dinners_?"

The look on Sheldon's face was long-suffering. Penny wondered how he'd react if she smacked him upside the head and informed him that she had it worse dealing with him than he had it dealing with her. But he would never believe her so she didn't.

"It seemed the only viable option."

She was slightly hurt. "It didn't occur to you to call me and ask me to help with dinner?"

"I didn't think you would be able to properly address my specific meal-time requirements."

Penny stared at him. For a moment, she debated shoving his specific meal-time requirements up his ass, but she refrained. There wasn't any need to start a huge battle over nothing. "Well, fine. Why don't we have tv dinner night together then," she suggested, opening the freezer. She shuffled through the neatly arranged box and located two dinners.

"I only purchased enough for myself for the duration of Leonard's absence," Sheldon announced.

Jumping, Penny whirled, one hand pressed to her chest. Her eyes were huge, her heart pounding in her chest. Adrenaline surged through her for a moment, and then she froze, staring at Sheldon. "Don't _do_ that!" she exclaimed after a brief second of silence.

"Do what?"

"Sneak up behind me!"

"I was not sneaking," Sheldon replied. "I simply sought to inform you of the fact that there are not enough TV dinners to share."

Penny pursed her lips, regarding Sheldon with a contemplative look. "What if I eat one tonight with you and bring you a burger tomorrow?"

She watched him consider her proposal and wondered exactly what was going on in his head while he did so. Was he calculating statistics? Was he only pretending to think about her proposal while really thinking about some epic and earth-shatteringly important new theory that would revolutionize the way the world perceived itself? Maybe he was contemplating whether or not he wanted the shrimp fettuccini or the Tuscan chicken. She'd fight him to the death for the Tuscan chicken. Maybe even challenge him to Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. She had watched him and the other guys play it enough: they always chose Spock. Paper disproved Spock. And didn't Lizard poison him? Something like that. She could so win.

"Your proposition is acceptable," Sheldon replied. "I would like the Tuscan chicken."

"Oh, uh-uh, no way, I don't think so Dr. Whack-a-Doodle." Penny took a step into his personal space. Sheldon simply looked down at her, one bow quirked. They did this a lot, standing toe-to-toe and glaring at each other. Penny wondered if Sheldon realized how alpha male-ish it was of him to refuse to stand down. Crossing her arms, she tossed her head. Her hair shifted over her shoulder, revealing her neck, and she tilted her head to the side. With immense satisfaction, she watched Sheldon's eyes briefly flicker from hers to her neck and then back again. "I hate shrimp."

"It is a proven fact that poorly preferred sea food can make a person ill."

Penny quirked a brow, mimicking Sheldon's expression. "You bought it. You were going to eat it."

He scowled. Penny scowled back. Sheldon crossed his arms, mimicking her. Penny shifted her weight forward. There was a brief moment where neither moved. Then Sheldon dropped his arms, grasped them behind his back and turned. "Very well, the Tuscan chicken is yours. _This_ time."

With a squeal of delight, Penny grabbed her packaged meal, tearing it open. She rushed to the microwave and shoved the chicken in, hitting the number five button. Sheldon came up behind her, shrimp fettuccini in hand. When her chicken was done, Sheldon put the shrimp in. Dropping the plastic container onto a plate, Penny rooted through a draw and grabbed a pair of forks. "For you," she said to Sheldon

Sheldon took the fork, procured a plate of his own, and made his way to the couch. Penny followed. While Sheldon took up his usual spot, Penny settled into the armchair that Leonard had claimed, less officially than Sheldon, as his own.

"So whatcha doin'?" she asked, spearing a piece of chicken and popping it in her mouth.

Sheldon gave her a long, measuring look. She knew that look. It wasn't the same as his "I'm-too-smart, you-won't-understand" look and it wasn't anything like his "You-stupid-lesser-human" look. He was trying to figure out whether or not telling her what he was doing was a good thing. That was curious. Grinning, Penny set her food aside. "Sheldon," she crooned in a sing-song voice. "Tell me."

He hesitated a bit longer. "Age of Conan," he said slowly.

Penny hadn't touched that game in ages. "You still play?" she asked, doing her best to keep her tone conversational. She wasn't about to get completely addicted to it again, no chance in hell. Not after that whole incident with Wolowitz. She still refused to talk about it. Once, Wolowitz had attempted to bring it up. She hadn't punched him that time, but she had made it very clear that any mention of the incident would result in grievous harm to certain parts of his anatomy that he loved quite dearly.

"Yes," Sheldon replied.

"Still Sheldor?"

"Yes." His voice sounded stiffer.

Laughing, Penny picked up her chicken again. "Queen Penelope is _not_ in the house tonight, sweetie. Don't look like I just dropped an atomic bomb on you."

"If you dropped an atomic bomb on me, I would not be here to have a look on my face, and you would not be around to see it."

Oh, Sheldon. Always taking refuge in logic and reason.

"It's a figure of speech," Penny returned. Shifting and popping another piece of chicken in her mouth, she gestured with her empty fork toward his computer. "What are you doing right now? In the game?"

Sheldon was, again, slow to reply. "Battling the god Set in pursuit of the Staff of Snakes."

"Ooh, I never got that far," Penny replied, grinning. "You going alone?"

"Yes."

"Want some company?"

Sheldon watched her warily. "Do you still have the software installed?"

Laughing, Penny shook her head. "Nope, but I can keep you company while you kick Set's evil ass," she told him with a grin. Sheldon stared. "Come on. Let's finish, then grab some cheetos and do it."

Twenty minutes later, Penny was leaning hard against Sheldon's shoulder, laughing and shouting encouragement, almost directly into his ear. "Go, go, go! No, don't hold back! Healing potion, healing potion! That's your opening, why are you hesitating?" She shrieked with laughter, pushing against his shoulder as Sheldon hunched over further and stared at the computer screen.

He was so intense, so determined. It was intriguing to watch him. There was something about how doggedly he pursued an issue that Penny really well and truly loved.

Suddenly, the music changed.

"Ahhah!" Penny crowed with delight. "You did it! You beat him!" Tossing her arms around him, Penny enveloped Sheldon in a hug. "Good job!"

A small smile tugged at the corner of Sheldon's lips. "I haven't finished the game. There is no cause celebrate."

"Oh, pish-posh, stop that," Penny replied, still laughing. "Now, on to the Valley of Doom!"


End file.
